‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh’: What is the meaning behind Frank Zappa’s farewell to the Mothers of Invention?
It’s certainly not unusual for a band to release a compilation of previously unreleased tracks as a final commercial enterprise after a break-up. If you’re Frank Zappa, however, even a conventional idea quickly becomes something ludicrously unconventional.
As such, when he pulled the plug on the original Mothers of Invention in 1969, Zappa immediately set to work on a slightly more ambitious version of an outtakes album.
Meticulously scraping together every demo, half-baked idea, live jam, and abandoned experiment off the cutting room floor, Zappa set forth to release a mega compilation as a Mothers farewell—not a double album, not a triple album, but a 12-record extravaganza.
Zappa would later claim in a 1970 issue of Jazz & Pop that he actually completed that project, but only later was forced to reason with the logistics of actually releasing it. “We did a cost breakdown on doing that, and in order to press 10,000 each of the 12 records, plus coverage, it would have come to about a quarter of a million dollars… So we just tossed that one into the garbage can.”
When the 12-record plan was still in effect, Zappa had planned to call it The Mothers of Invention Record Club; a sort of gift that would keep on giving. Abandoning that idea, however, had sent him into a very different creative mindset, aggressively “ripping up” boatloads of carefully curated material to produce a mere pair of 1970 records. The first, Burnt Weeny Sandwich, leaned more toward the Mothers’ nearly-finished studio recordings, while the second, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, plucked more of its tunes from the band’s freestyle, on-stage repertoire.
Obviously, ridiculous album titles were par for the course when it came to Zappa, but these two weren’t quite as random and nonsensical as they initially appeared. In fact, you could almost say—at a stretch—that Zappa was being slightly nostalgic here.
Burnt Weeny Sandwich, while objectively one of the stupidest album titles in rock history, was supposedly inspired by Zappa’s genuine affection for eating an overcooked hot dog—Hebrew National brand—in between a couple of pieces of bread, slabbed over with mustard. It’s a comfort food, I suppose, and maybe a nice thing to associate with a retrospective of your old band.
Weasels Ripped My Flesh, admittedly, doesn’t sound comforting in any way whatsoever. The title, which was probably emotionally inspired by the frustrating work of grinding down 12 records-worth of material, was also a direct callback to a magazine cover story from a 1956 issue of Man’s Life, literally titled ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh’, in which a man recounts his bloody encounter with a pack of furry creatures whose “claws tore at my skin, putting razor sharp teeth in easy reach of my flesh.”
Zappa had unsurprisingly flagged this idea when he read the magazine as a teenager, and came back to it now as a 30-year-old, hiring artist Neon Park to create an album cover based on the concept. Park’s marching orders from Zappa: “What can you do that’s worse than this?”
Park was up to the challenge. His cover art, which adapts a 1950s Schick advertisement by replacing the electric razor in a man’s hand with the titular attacking weasel, remains one of the most iconic in the Zappa catalogue. Is it also a heartfelt and sentimental tribute to the band of remarkably talented musicians who helped put Frank Zappa on the map? Maybe not. But Weasels Ripped My Flesh is certainly true to the Mothers of Invention’s ethos, and despite its cobbled-together nature, it stands as a worthy relic from the band’s late ‘60s peak.
